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Winner of the 2002 Outstanding Book Award presented by the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association The election of 1994, which heralded the demise of Apartheid as a legally enforced institutionalization of "whiteness," disconnected the prior moorings of social identity for most South Africans, whatever their political persuasion. In one of the most profound collective psychological experiences of the contemporary world, South Africans are renegotiating the meaning of their social positionalities. In this book, Melissa Steyn, herself a white South African, grapples with what it means to be white, reflecting on events in her past that still resonate with her today. Her research includes discourse with more than fifty white South Africans who are faced with reinterpreting their old selves in the light of new knowledge and possibilities. Framed within current debates of postcolonialism and postmodernism, "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be" explores how the changes in South Africa's social and political structure are changing the white population's identity and sense of self.
Explores the undertheorized convergence of postcoloniality and whiteness.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. As social constructs, masculinities and femininities are continually being challenged and reconstructed, and in so doing, new subjectivities are re/produced. The boundaries of gender thus remain both violent and vulnerable; violent in the Butlerian sense of subject formation and normative gender policing, and vulnerable as they are fraught with possibilities for new ways of gendering and new definitions of sexual difference. This volume thus examines the boundaries of masculinities and femininities through various cultural, socio-historical, and political contexts, and the tensions which arise from the constant challenges and reconstructions. Violent and Vulnerable Performances: Challenging the Gender Boundaries of Masculinities and Femininities contains fourteen chapters which demonstrate the situatedness of gender, and its impacts on race, class, sex, the body, identity, language, work, the family, and further cultural, socio-political, and economic processes.
The present volume contains general essays on: the relevance of 'Commonwealth' literature; the treatment of Dalits in literature and culture; the teaching of African literature in the UK; 'sharing places' and Drum magazine in South Africa; black British book covers as primers for cultural contact; Christianity, imperialism, and conversion; Orang Pendek and Papuans in colonial Indonesia; Carnival and drama in the anglophone Caribbean; issues of choice between the Maltese language and Its Others; and patterns of interaction between married couples in Malta. As well as these, there are essays providing close readings of works by the following authors: Chinua Achebe, André Aciman, Diran Adebayo...
Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human. Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.
In the 1980s, the University of Cape Town's social anthropology department was predominantly oriented by an 'exposé' style of critical scholarship. The enemy was the apartheid state, the ethical imperative was clear and a combative metaphor for doing research motivated the department. Andrew David Spiegel, known affectionately as 'Mugsy' by his students and colleagues, has been a central, if understated, figure of this history and helped to frame the theoretical charge of a generation of students looking to counter apartheid from 'inside'. In a series of interviews between the senior professor and one of his students - Jessica Dickson - Spiegel offers a unique perspective from the centre of anthropology's recent history in South Africa.
Argues that South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation relied on an unexamined but interrelated system of sexed oppression that was at once both rigid and flexible.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Unsettling Whiteness brings together an international collection that considers anew the politics, practices and representations of whiteness at a time when nations worldwide continue to grapple with issues that are underwritten by whiteness.
The essays cover an astonishing range of subject matter, from mental health and plastic surgery to literature, music, political philosophy, performance, popular culture and history. They interrogate the dominance of whiteness, exposing the underpinnings of white privilege and considering its global consequences.
This volume provides an overview of fundamental or ‘grounding’ themes in African Cultural Studies, including the articulation of African cultural studies, the issue of Africa’s diaspora(s), African identity and identifications, and media studies in Africa and its relationship with cultural studies. The first of two volumes, the book predominantly pulls together a rich reservoir of previously published articles from Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, mapping a long history of the field that draws from a diverse range of origins and locations, especially from within Africa itself. The first section of the book addresses how African cultural studies has been called for...